Serious eye injury caused by rotating wire brushes.

CASE 1 A 69-year-old male general maintenance labourer attended eye casualty with a history of blurred vision in his left eye. He had been using an electrically driven wire brush at work when a fragment of wire broke off the brush hitting his eye. On examination, the patient had a visual acuity of 6/9 in his right eye and 6/36 in his left. He had a full thickness corneal perforation at the 6 o'clock position, a traumatic cataract, and damage to the iris sphincter. After 48 hours' observation in hospital he was discharged. Three months later he had an uncomplicated extracapsular cataract extraction with posterior chamber intraocular lens implant and achieved a visual acuity of 6/6. Figure 1 shows the track of the foreign body in the lens at presentation.